THIS YEAR’S St. Patrick’s Day celebration in Savannah was one of the better ones.

On Saturday, volunteers with the St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee had the 189th version of the mammoth procession running like clockwork through the downtown, with very few pauses. Crowds along the parade route were big, boisterous and in a cheerful mood.

The religious, cultural and familial aspects make up the foundation of this holiday, which honors Ireland’s patron saint. That bedrock remains strong.

In non-parade-related festivities, it’s encouraging to see that most celebrants who came here to eat, drink and be merry also behaved themselves for the most part.

Police reported making 79 arrests over the weekend. The vast majority (70) were for misdemeanors. Seven were city ordinance violations and only two were felonies.

That’s on the low-ish side. Two years ago, when the parade was on a Friday and the festival was stretched over four days, 190 people wound up in handcuffs.

Most of the arrests took place between 4 p.m. Saturday and 4 a.m. Sunday, with the bulk of the arrests occurring on the riverfront, followed by City Market. More than 300 Metro police officers worked the festival, backed up with officers from other agencies. This year, the department tried something new in Ellis Square next to City Market — a 30-foot-tall observation tower. Whether this high perch deterred revelers from doing stupid things and getting arrested, and should be employed for crowd control in future events, is something Chief Willie Lovett will have to answer.

Police, city officials and downtown businesses also will have to evaluate how the expanded festival zone worked and how much revenue was collected through the sale of $5 wristbands. In previous years, this controlled area where people had to purchase wristbands to drink alcohol in public was limited to River Street. This year, the city expanded it south from the riverfront to Broughton Street, which included City Market.

It will be interesting to see what the postmortem shows.

At least it accomplished one thing — it spread out the crowd. That helps police.

Capt. Philip Reilley, who led the City Market command post, said that while the crowd was big on River Street, it wasn’t as dense as previous years.

That’s a good thing for revelers, especially if a drunken idiot decides to urinate off one of the pedestrian walkways over Factor’s Walk to the cobblestones below. The nasty “sprinkler” who got caught red-handed, so to speak, relieving himself this way this year should be sentenced to the city’s cleanup detail — and given a hefty fine.

But such stupid offenses didn’t appear to dampen the enthusiasm or hurt the experiences of the tens of thousands of people who celebrated.

Except for the fine weather, it wasn’t the luck of the Irish that carried the day. Considerable effort had been invested in planning for the parade and other weekend events.

This is a gargantuan undertaking. Those involved earned a tip of the hat. Then they can start planning for next year.